GAL Contact Sync Between Construction Companies After an Acquisition
Primary Actor: Cornerstone Van Der Bilt Construction Inc.
Secondary Actor: CrestField Construction, LLC
Client’s Pain Point
Cornerstone Van Der Bilt Construction Incorporated (CVB) is a large-scale construction company headquartered in California that acquired CrestField Construction (CFC), a smaller competitor based in Oregon, in the previous year. CVB needed a solution to synchronize contacts cross-organizationally to collaborate on upcoming projects.
Project teams for CVB and CrestField utilize the Global Address List (GAL) for storing contacts of vendors and employees across various departments. At the time of the acquisition, CVB had a GAL consisting of roughly 22,000 individuals, including employees, vendors, and suppliers. On the other hand, CFC had a list roughly one-fourth the size of CVB’s. Consequently, sorting, merging, and handling duplicate contacts posed a logistical nightmare for the IT team – CVB’s IT manager, Jeff, estimated the merger could take several hundred hours of labor to complete; and this wouldn’t account for future GAL changes. The IT team at CVB needed a software solution to exchange contacts between both entities on a daily basis.
CiraHub’s Solution
Jeff finds CiraHub, a two-way sync solution for contacts and calendars ideal for organizations using Microsoft 365, Microsoft Exchange, and G-suite. CiraHub merges data sources from multiple platforms ensuring that information stays consistent across devices and software.
To perform GAL-to-GAL sync with CiraHub, each organization had to supply an Microsoft 365 Global Admin Account and a Dedicated Service Account. Then, Jeff logged in to CiraHub and started a Hub and Spoke set-up that allowed him to create a Hub on CiraHub’s dashboard and attach individual Contact “Spokes” for each organization under separate tenants using each company’s GAL admin account. The process allowed for either credential-based or certificate-based authentication. Once Jeff had that sorted, he was able to enable two-way synchronization between the created spokes and the Hub he had created. The result was a two-way GAL to GAL contact sync between CVB and CrestField which allowed project teams from both companies to collaborate and work efficiently.